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The Full Monty, Part 1: SBSH’s PocketBreeze

In the previous two installments of this series, we covered ways to optimize and extend your Pocket PC Today screen while still retaining the same basic look and feel that Microsoft intended. Today, we’re going to look at PocketBreeze from SBSH Software, a way to completely replace the basic look of your Today screen with a tabbed interface that shows a lot more information.

The Basics, Reshuffled

PocketBreeze is one of the most popular Today modules out there, and for good reason. This one program creates a subtle change in focus on your Today screen. Instead of it being simply a bulletin board with pointers to other applications, PocketBreeze turns your Today screen into a full-fledged planner in its own right. It blocks out a chunk of the Today screen for itself, and then provides you with tabs for Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Messaging, Special Events and more. Each of these tabs essentially replaces the stock application for that kind of data, making your Today screen the only planner you need.

That said, I try to keep tabs to a minimum. I turn off the Special Events, Tasks and Messaging tabs, and focus on the Calendar tab. PocketBreeze provides far more flexibility than any other program when it comes to setting up your schedule just the way you want it. First off, you can display tabs vertically or horizontally. Horizontal is the default, but I think vertical not only is a better use of space but more in line with the way other Today plugins look, with icons in a column to the far left.

Inside the plugin itself, you see your schedule. I have PocketBreeze set to include email and undated tasks under the current day, so I get a view like the following:

• A translucent, collapsible bar for today that also shows a small timebar with a visual representation of the day’s commitments. Spoken-for time blocks can be color coded by status (tentative, free, busy) or category.
• A listing of my email accounts with the number of unread for each. I can jump straight to the Messaging app from one of these lines via the d-pad.
• My appointments for today, showing start and end times and location. Again these have colored bars in front of them showing the status color.
• Overdue tasks, complete with a checkbox
• Due tasks
• Undated tasks

Then I get another translucent bar for tomorrow, and so on. I can display anywhere from one to thirty days this way, but again, I want to minimize scrolling, so I generally only display two or three. Note that the font size is a bit smaller than the standard for Today plugins, so you can fit a bit more on each screen. You can also add drop shadows to the lettering, making it readable against just about any background.

What really makes this setup special is the depth of d-pad integration. The nature of the Today screen is that you’ll be looking stuff up and occasionally want to make small changes without digging out the stylus. The folks at SBSH really get that, and if you have a keyboard-equipped device like a Treo or many of the HTC devices, you can do just about anything without touching the screen at all. Not only is each tab navigable by the d-pad, but clicking the d-pad on the Calendar tab itself gives you a context menu to create a new appointment or task, jump to Calendar, jump to Tasks, change the categories or open the options for PocketBreeze itself. Click on an appointment, and you get a popup menu to Open, Delete, Beam, Reschedule (!) or clone the appointment along with a slew of other options. Same deal with tasks on the Calendar tab; I can mark a task complete without using the stylus in just a couple clicks of the d-pad, something that’s not even possible with the stock Tasks application.

Settings, We Got Settings

Planner applications tend to spawn settings dialogs, and PocketBreeze is no exception. It’s not quite as overwhelming as the settings “page” in Pocket Informant or DateBk6, but setting up PocketBreeze just right isn’t for the faint of heart. There are dozens of options for the Calendar tab alone, and some oddly missing options as well. You can hard code the vertical size of PocketBreeze, but it can’t (as yet) autosense how big it should be to take up all unclaimed space while not creating a scrollbar (Spb Diary, which I’ll get to next, can do just that). But aside from those few exceptions, PocketBreeze as all the flexibility you’ll need to set it up exactly the way that makes the most sense to you.

One of the great things about PocketBreeze is the ability to incorporate other Today plugins into itself as tabs, freeing up even more vertical real estate for your Calendar tab (this is where displaying tabs vertically really makes sense and pays off). You can add just about any Today plugin as a tab, and you even get the option to manage how they use memory. For each custom tab, you can specify how it loads:

• Static: The tab loads when PocketBreeze loads and stays in memory. This is how all Today modules usually load.
• Dynamic: The tab loads as soon as you click on it, runs while you’re looking at it, then gets torn down and releases its memory when you navigate away. This is the most memory-friendly choice, but is really only useful for Today plugins that do absolutely nothing when you’re not using them. I use this choice for BTAudio Today, which just changes the registry settings between voice speed-dial and audio passthrough for Bluetooth. When I’m not changing that setting, the plugin just sits there.
• DynamicInit: A cross between the first two. The tab doesn’t load at all until you tap or click on it, but then remains in memory when you do something else. This is the default setting and a good compromise. And if you run short on memory, each custom tab has a “Release Tab” option in the tab’s popup settings that frees that tab’s memory manually.

Suite Deal

While PocketBreeze is a great plugin by itself, it gets even better used in conjunction with SBSH’s iLauncher. I know I stated in the last installment of this series that I don’t really use Today screen launchers, and that remains true. But iLauncher provides some other nifty features that really extend how you can use your Today screen, even when you’re looking at your Calendar tab.

The first feature is the title bar meter. Across the top of my screen, iLauncher provides a multicolor meter that shows my remaining battery power. This is visible in all applications, but still doesn’t get in the way because it uses otherwise completely unused screen real estate, the very top two rows of pixels. This always-available glance at my power level means never scrambling for a charger at the last minute.

At the bottom of the today screen, you have a Tray, similar to the one next to your clock on a desktop Windows taskbar. By default, there are only a few icons in there, but iLauncher allows you specify one tab of launcher items as the Tray Tab. This allows me to use that space, otherwise unused, for memory meters, quick access to Settings applets and a quick way to get to my IR Keyboard driver right next to where I rotate the screen to use the keyboard.

Survey Says…

SBSH has a winner here and they just keep improving it. Their customer service is top notch and there are real discussions between SBSH developers and users on their forums. PocketBreeze completely rebuilds your Today screen and takes it to a whole new level.

Next: Spb Diary